The Vordel Cloud Service Broker (CSB) aggregates services from multiple domains including private, public and community clouds. The CSB registers the services from all three domains into a single repository, which the company says will simplify management, monitoring and policy enforcement. The CSB also includes features for caching, acceleration, analysis and transformation.

The major piece of the CSB is the Multi-Domain Registry Repository (MDDR), which aggregates the services across domains. The MDDR registers services from public cloud offerings from vendors like Amazon and Google along side users’ own on-premises systems so they can be dealt with from a central point.

Matsumura said best-of-breed tools technologies is increasingly key in SOA. Yet, he continued, there remains a tendency to promote single-vendor solutions.

“With in a lot of SOA projects there is a tribalism – a group of folks that have a self-interested quality, for example, a specific vendor platform interest,” he said

Using the language of software patterns architecture, he described this inclination as a tendency to promote a “single-vendor SOA anti pattern.” Matsumura maintained that Software AG’s CentraSite can act as a registry or repository that effectively coordinates the meta data between diverse products, and suggested the APIs available on the SOALink Cookbook site further that cause.

He described the SOALink Cookbook as the “recipes for building an SOA ecosystem.”

The SOALINK Cookbook can be accessed online at http://communities.softwareag.com/centrasite.

Fowler goes on to discuss the dreamy underpinnings of such systems, and the role humans still typically play in a process that, at the least, is fairly difficult to automate. Fowler went on further to discuss some projects afoot to design registries around human work flow. “People develop and use services, so orient it around people,” writes Fowler. He talks about the HumaneRegistry project.

So it is sounding good. We’re thinking: there is something here. He criticizes UDDI, but he is in a lot of good company.

But Fowler went on yet further to say the heart of this new-styled registry is a wiki and our heart fell in turn. Has anyone alive ever kept up with a wiki? They are tedious, like clip board lists, and they usually end up dormant.

Fowler is deep in the Agile movement – where people pledge to be good wiki citizens and so forth. Maybe the registry is a text book example of a problem that will only be solved via a happy medium of human and automaton.

HumaneRegistry – martinFowler.com

“The newest market leading Systinet UDDI registry forms the cockpit for managing not only services, but with the newly added Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) support, takes the helm for business processes, too,” Gardner writes. “HP plans to further push the envelope on a master management value even further into IT operations and IT Service Management, as well as a PPM role with the registry.”

The addition of a configuration management database (CMDB) sets the stage for a wider “culture of governance” to emerge in enterprises, Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager at HP Software, tells Gardner. 

Gardner also points to a comprehensive assessment of HP’s governance products and strategies by fellow analyst Brad Shimmin posted on the Current Analysis Website.

In SOA provides a test for QA, HP finds, SearchSOA covered HPs expansion of governance to cover quality assurance. And in an earlier article, HP integrates design and runtime SOA governance, SearchSOA covered the design time / runtime integration in Systinet.

SOA fatigue may be traced to aspects of SOA that people have sometimes rightly described as bloated. For SOA repositories and SOA governance the jury is still out.

People have yet to conclude how much is too much and what is the right mix of best design practice and ‘good-enough to ship’ development push for organizations that are – let’s face it – in the business to make apps that save or make money.

From days of old we know about project bloat – isn’t it fair to say we have to watch out for SOA bloat? Simple SOA should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Yet, it should not become Super SOA – super-sized and expensive. Being too infrastructure-oriented and too far removed from killer apps with big ROI – that is sure to cause disenchantment.

The impression has grown only more stark in recent weeks as bloggers, sites, and magazines have begun to press the idea of Small SOA, or more recently, WOA, or Web-Oriented Architecture, to the detriment of Super SOA. That could be a good thing.

Sometimes people are too quick to assign ‘bloat’ and too quick as well to pretend a lighter version of middleware architecture is going to solve all problems. Yet, it is true that things can grow beyond common sense proportion.

What all this chatter belies is that Services and Architecture are the important parts of SOA. The goal is to build the right app, make sure it works, and ensure it will fit with other apps. Architects and developers in organizations are using that services approach. It is not a product, and it is not magic. It is a way to do work.

We are just reaching the moment when many of SOA initiatives are going live full time. Did everyone ‘get it right?’ Probably not. Is that a reason to run from SOA? No.

SOA was no magic bullet. Neither is WOA. Is this an interesting time? Yep.

The two companies were both rated as leaders in respective governance areas by two major analyst firms, said Roberto Medrano, SOA Software’s executive vice president, in making the argument that the new whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

Pointing to a Gartner Inc. magic quadrant for “Integrated SOA Governance Technology Sets” published at the end of 2007, he said, “Why do we say we’re leaders? It’s not because we say it. Gartner says SOA Software is a leader in SOA governance. LogicLibrary is there as a visionary. The combination of SOA Software as a leader and LogicLibrary as a visionary certainly puts us up there.”

Medrano then points to a Forrest Research Inc. wave chart for ”SOA Service Life-Cycle Management,” published in the first quarter 2008, which shows LogicLibrary and SOA Software in the running for leadership roles in a graphical scrum with IBM, Hewlett Packard Corp., and Software AG. BEA Systems Inc., now being acquired by Oracle Corp., rises above the rest in the Forrester view.

The acquisition of LogicLibrary by SOA Software follows a trend among governance vendors that is likely to continue, writes Dana Gardner, principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions LLC., in his blog today about the deal.

“The merger underscores not only the SOA vendor consolidation trend (ongoing), but also highlights the market driver of more end-to-end governance and management aspects of SOA deployments,” Gardner writes. “HP and TIBCO also had recent announcements that point up a wide and more automated approach to SOA governance/management.”

“What’s more,” Gardner added, ”I expect to see more of this ‘total management’ approach to SOA coming from the open source SOA infrastructure providers, too.”

The strength of the SOA Software/Logic Library combination, Medrano argues is that while the two companies are highly rated on the same analysts’ charts, their technologies are complementary, adding to the greater whole with little overlap.

“There is no real competition between us and LogicLibrary in terms of the assets and products that we have,” the SOA executive said. Concluding that with their product lines merged: “We become one of the few if not the only one that provides the entire SOA governance for all the enterprise assets.”

Alan Himler, who until today was CEO and chairman of LogicLibrary and is now senior vice president, product management for SOA Software, said the combined governance technologies cover more than Web services.

“The beauty of it is that it covers not just services but other types of assets,” he said. “We can offer a solution from the distributed level up to the mainframe.”

The executives of the two companies points to the individual technologies they offered:

SOA Software technology included:

• policy lifecycle governance
• SOA registry, service lifecycle, compliance policy
• operational governance
• service security, mediation, management, operational policy

LogicLibrary offered:

• SOA asset lifecycle management
• SOA development governance and SOA repository
• IDE and SCM integration

Medrano pointed out specific areas where LogicLibrary products will strengthen SOA Software offerings. He said the LogicLibrary Logidex product complements its SOA Service Lifecycle Management position with added capabilities including:

• Compliance policy definition and validation
• Mainframe artifact discovery
• Management policy definition and integrated implementation and enforcement
• Depth of support for service definitions
• Enhanced standards support
• Richer RBAC model and IDM system integration
• Federated identity and trust mediation

SOA Software’s Workbench is strengthened with capabilities from LogicLibrary including:

While financial details of the acquisition involving privately held companies was not released, Medrano said it involved a stock transfer. He said Los Angeles-based SOA Software will maintain the LogicLibrary offices including the Pittsburg, PA headquarters, and the Rochester MN research lab. The majority of the staff will also be retained, he added.

Quality is a key element in software development and it should go without saying that the more business that gets pumped through Web services, the more important it will be to have a good QA process in place for those services. Noting that “lack of central visibility” is normal in the classic software development lifecyle, Ariola listed what he thinks are key elements in that SOA quality process.

1. SOA necessitates centralization, a role played by the registry/repository. He argued that stovepipes become inevitable without it.

2. A health check needs to be performed to make sure the asset meets the requirements. Among the potential requirements, he highlighted defining the asset’s consistency and the boundaries for its reuse.

3. You need a convenient way to emulate the service. Taking down a component could cause unintended chaos once it’s being leveraged in multiple places. Testing and changes are best handled in the virtual arena in order to avoid that trap.

4. If a component or service is going to reused, the testing expectations need to be made readily available so that different orchestration scenarios can be vetted. In general the testing environment should be as open and accessible as possible.
5. Make sure you fully and accurately define your SLAs, future users of that service will need to understand the true behavior expectations behind it.

6. Be prepared to do some sort of compliance monitoring in order to make sure your services are being properly used.

So much energy has been poured into establishing standards, building out distinct product markets and fleshing out platforms that it’s been a while since we’ve seen much in the way of innovation. Early in this decade the ESB, the services registry, Web services management software and XML networking hardware pushed the IT envelope. They gave users a way to combine applications in a whole new way. Suddenly component assembly was on the table and loosely coupled, autonomous, stateless, composable, reusable services moved from theory to reality.

The REST-based registry isn’t likely to create that sort of paradigm shift, but it does shake up a marketplace that may be getting a bit complacent. Both of these releases are open source and both try to support the service-oriented concept of discoverability without using the UDDI standard. You might be asking, isn’t SOA supposed to be standards-based? Well, yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean that UDDI has to be one of those standards. REST is built on the HTTP standard. It also opens up the question of how can we better enable the princples of service orientation?

I’m not implying WSO2 and Mulesource have found a better way to build a registry, UDDI may still be the gold standard as far as that’s concerned, but they have opened up the subject for debate by attacking discoverability in a new way. They also might be setting the table for the next wave of innovation in SOA. Going back to a December podcast with Forrester Research’s John Rymer, the area of dynamic business applications begs for real-time innovation. Perhaps Microsoft’s Oslo initiative will break ground in model-driven design. IBM may be unveiling its REST-based Project Zero this spring.

Wherever the innovation comes from, we need to remember that it will come. We’ve been conditioned to think of SOA as a set of products and standards that popped up seven years ago, but what it really entails is an approach to technology that will allow you to best incorporate the next wave of innovation … and the one after that … and the one after that. These REST-based registries may be the precursors of advances to come.